Data represents a significant asset for many entities. Consequently, data loss, whether accidental or caused by malicious activity, can be costly in terms of wasted manpower, loss of goodwill from customers, loss of time and potential legal liability. In order to provide proper protection of data for business and legal purposes (e.g., to ensure quick recovery of data in the event of a disaster or to comply with document retention requirements), entities often back up data on a regular basis. Many entities have now implemented storage area networks (“SAN”) to relieve much of the burden of mass data storage and backup from the respective entity's local area network (“LAN”), freeing the LAN for more immediate data storage and manipulation operations.
Many SAN storage devices read/write data for storage purposes over the fibre channel SAN but provide management data, usually according to the simple network management protocol (“SNMP”), over TCP networks through built-in Ethernet connections. Other storage devices use in-band or special encapsulated storage commands to communicate management data'over fibre channel networks. Device management is controlled by management agents or management applications running on SAN hosts or dedicated systems that receive device management data from and issue device management commands to the SAN storage devices.
In order to detect and communicate with various devices within a SAN, management clients currently integrate industry standard and proprietary management information base (“MIB”) information for many different devices. Management clients must constantly update and maintain access information about a wide variety of storage devices in order to offer comprehensive management functionality to the SAN. As diversity of SAN devices that can be managed increases, the task of device management is becoming more difficult.
This difficulty is due, in part, to the fact that many SAN devices are designed to communicate management data to specifically configured management clients. If SAN devices employing different device management protocols are used, multiple management clients are typically required. Thus, in order to effectively manage SAN storage devices, an entity controlling a SAN will either have to deploy multiple, redundant, management clients, increasing costs and reducing efficiency, or limit the types of storage devices used to those that can communicate using a particular device management protocol, reducing scalability.
One solution to help alleviate these problems has been the use of management clients that provide a framework for “plug-ins” for various device management protocols. This solution, however, has several shortcomings. One such deficiency is that an entity controlling the SAN is still limited to using only SAN devices for which a plug-in has been developed.